Caught in the Web
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - by Steve Wilhelm Staff Writer
At The Boeing Co., they believe in letting Web sites grow organically.
In just five years the company has sprouted 2,200 Web sites on 1,138 servers, some of the sites as big as Amazon.com, said Graeber Jordan, who until recently was Boeing's senior manager, Web Program Office. Most of these Web sites are created at the local level without direction from Boeing's hierarchy.
"If you try to manage something this big from a central source, it will never get this big," Jordan said, speaking from Boeing's Internet demonstration room at corporate headquarters. "If you want to have a tool that can be used by anybody and do anything, it needs to be organic."
Boeing interest in the Internet started early, and at the top. Boeing chairman Phil Condit spent several hours clicking his way over the Internet one day early in 1994, and emerged a convert. At that time, the company operated just six Web servers.
"I got it, and Phil Condit got it, and several others got it in 1994. We knew it was going to be like electricity," Jordan said. "Phil figured it out, that the mouse click's ability to navigate information space would be really thrilling inside a company like Boeing."
The next year Boeing put together a Web study group of top executives, which created Boeing's vision of Web openness. That vision has been controversial in some quarters, where people believe Boeing's Web structure should be more heavily orchestrated.
"It's unusually permissive for any company, and especially for a company as risk-adverse as Boeing," Jordan said. "If you want to have a tool that can be used by anybody, to do anything, it has to be organic."
At the same time Boeing executives were meeting with peers from other Puget Sound corporations, including Paccar Inc., Weyerhaeuser Co., Starbucks Coffee Co. and Frank Russell Co., to figure out how to best use the Web.
"Nobody knew where we were going. We were learning from each other," Jordan said.
Most Boeing employees have full access to the outside Internet, although that's at the discretion of their managers, Jordan said. The company uses no formal filtering system to keep employees away from risqué or violent Web sites. Just "a very small number" of employees have ever been disciplined for abusing their Internet privileges, Jordan said.
For people outside Boeing, http://www.boeing.com is the best-known Boeing Web site. Put together by Boeing's public relations department, it's packed with colorful images of Boeing aircraft, as well as press releases, order and delivery data, and background information. A media version of the site, with downloadable images, is available to journalists with a password.
But the majority of remaining Boeing Web sites are far drier, most of them interactive repositories of huge amounts of information used by Boeing employees and outside suppliers. Their complex variety is revealed by the displays in Boeing's Internet display room. These Web sites are open to people inside Boeing, but only outsiders with the right passwords can gain access.
At Tessa Precision Products Inc. near Cleveland, for instance, general manager Erika Battaglia download drawings, from a Boeing Web site, of airplane parts her company manufactures. In some cases she downloads digital information from the site directly into Tessa's computer design system, and then into its milling machines.
"A couple of clicks and you have your geometry figured out, instead of having to redraw the parts in your own system," she said, adding that she recently calculated the Web access is saving her company 40 hours a week.
"It's a wonderful Web site. I use it extensively," she said. "It's a very, very helpful tool."
The Web also has become essential for some of Boeing's most ambitious projects, such as the International Space Station. As integrator of the station, Boeing is responsible for coordinating the manufacture of segments around the world, and making them fit together in orbit. The difficulty of this is doubled by the fact that in most cases Boeing gets no chance to fit the segments together on the ground.
Now each piece of the space station has its own Web site, and builders around the world, including in Russia, are using the Internet to keep track of what their colleagues are doing.
Another heavily used site is Boeing's "Part Page," which makes Boeing's full inventory of spare parts instantly accessible to airlines around the world. The Web-based Part Page is supplanting an earlier system that required expensive hard-wired computer networks for the 70 largest airlines, representing 60 percent of Boeing's spare parts business.
"We were really aching for new technology," said Tom DiMarco, systems director for Airline Logistics Support for Boeing Commercial Airplane Group. With Boeing's streamlined parts centers able to ship parts in a matter of hours, the processing of paperwork, especially for smaller carriers, was becoming a significant logjam, he said.
Now airline mechanics around the world can log on and see how many of Boeing's seven parts centers have a particular spare part, how much it will cost, and order it. The procedure is so easy that even mechanics from the largest airlines are ordering directly from the Web when time pressure is high, avoiding the more time-consuming process of working through their airline's order department. Operating only since 1996, the parts page is the first of its type in the industry.
Latest News |
Most Viewed Stories |
Most Emailed Stories |
